Prizes included an iPod, sponsored by Ricoh, two Motorola ROKR E2 phones with Linux and Qt, sponsored by Staikos Computing, a years subscription to Linux Magzine as well as the right to help decide next years winners.

Thanks were handed out to pretty much everyone for the part they all played in making aKademy a success. aKademy local organiser Marcus Furlong received a standing ovation.

Switching operating systems is work. You have to invest a lot of time, for most people time better spent otherwise. This implies that you need a motivation sufficiently big to switch, which shrinks when both OSes have your apps.

This is always tough to tell, and I think it changes for the person. I know I watched my sister slowly switch to free stuff, and learn the things that were linux only on my computer, and then switch the nth time her Windows box needed to be reformatted and/or crash on her.

On the other side, my step-father is trying to decide whether he can switch, because he's tired of upgrading his home box every few years for minimal benefits, but cannot switch due to his music stuff online. ( And Microsoft gains another monopoly somewhere that hurts every one ) Anyway, in the mean time, he's been trying to switch in the areas he can to open source to make his inevitable move easier.

I use both linux and windows.
I like both. I think it's great to be able to have the same set of apps on both.
People complain about IE only sites. The reason is not just the IE has problem, but also that it can restrict people to windows. I think people should be able to choose the operating system they like best, not the one which will give them all the good apps. So make windows, mac, and linux software available on all or at least most platforms. Isn't that what open source is about, using software how you want, not how makers dictate it to you?

unfortunately porting Amarok to windows is not likely to help promote important standards like OGG.

As with many of the suggested ports to windows there is some concern about if it will be possible for windows ports to do all the things the KDE versions can do. It would be a terrible shame if people got the wrong idea about KDE.

> gain more developers for the project.

it will definately gain many more users in need of support and maybe some of those could be turned into contributors but it often takes a skilled maintainer to manage and encourage/mentor people in the right way to become active contributors. dont forget code is not the only form of contributions, documentation, marketing, usability, accessibility and translation can all be opportunities to put new users to work.

I think Krita has the potential for sure, I've seen some screenshots of what it can do and I must say, I'm very impressed. Unfortunately, when I tried it, I just couldn't figure out how to use it. Maybe it is because I'm too use to using Photoshop or maybe the usability could improve a bit. Since I was able to figure out how to use photoshop, I think it could be a usability thing... Having said that, I bet once I end up figuring out how to use it, it will be the solution for photoshop on KDE.

Boudewijn, I was recently trying to insert a few lines of text into a picture. I wanted to set the text to be center aligned. I couldn't figure out how to do it. Is this a feature that's not there yet? I couldn't find a "text frame" tool. Maybe I'm just not finding it? BTW, Congratulations!

There's no text frame tool yet indeed :-). It is possible (in 1.5/1.6) by embedding a KWord text document with a single text frame in your layer stack -- but that doesn't work entirely smoothly and you need to know what you're doing. I'm right now working on making it possible to use a single text frame in 2.0 (and embedded svg and so on).

Awesome! Thanks. I know this isn't the place for such questions, but you opened the door and I couldn't resist :-). I've already switched to using krita for my (not too intensive) image editing. It keeps on getting better.

Hi Boudewijn. The text frame tool will be handy when you get that implemented. Another thing I'm trying to do is create a cirle and fill it with a gradient. I haven't quite figured out ho to do that. What I'm really trying to do is create a CD label. I have a friend who took an existing CD label in jpeg format, broke it down in Photoshop, and gave me a quick tutorial on how to do it. Of course I'd like to do it in Krita.

We haven't implemented fill-with-gradient as an option to the shape tools yet, but there's an easy work-around. Draw your circle. With the select-contguous tool click inside the circle -- the inside is now selected (you may need to play with the threshold setting to get rid of nasty anti-aliasing issues). Then simply use the gradient tool.

I have to agree.
I recently upgradaded to koffice 1.6 and krita is getting really good, now it's stable and works faster and better, but I still miss a lot of tools (see 1) and think there are some parts confusing or difficult, as adjusting brightness/contrast. It indeed have a bright future and I belive in two years or less, it will steal the throne from the gimp.

In the other hand amarok is one of the most mature open source programs ever! It's simple but full of features, I simply love it.

1: being able to see selection size during selectioning (no only after releasing the mouse button), I also miss spray painting tool

There _is_ a spray painting tool, but it isn't very good. The combobox in the top toolbar has airbrush, eraser, pencil and brush options. I really should revisit that bit of code, it's probably still 2003 in those files :-).

Someone from people behind kde should track down Laurent for an interview. He constantly makes an insane number of commits and works on just about every part of KDE, but there is just about no information out there on who he is. I for one, am curious.

> I think he just wants to get work done, not being under the lights. I understand and respect this.

Giving him a big award probably doesn't help if he is determined to be private.
KDE and Mandriva should be very disappointed at a missed opportunity to promote the project. I assume he does want KDE to succeed and he as an opportunity to do that and it would be a shame to miss it. It should be possible to an article that promotes his work - without getting into his personal life - and maybe encourage contributors to help in areas he would most like to see more work being done. Hopefully developers can explain other ways how he could see an interview as an opportunity and use it to his advantage.

I really hope the marketing team will approach him again and strongly encourage him to give an interview.

Why is it that he feed for this site (http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf) contains the titles of the artices and not the body as well? I find it rather annyoning that I'm not able to read an article in my feed reader without browsing to the site.